Top Recommended Free Chromebook Media Player Apps: Effortless File Viewing

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Best Chromebook Video Player Free Download to Play Media Files

Posted by Kaylee Wood | Last update: April 28, 2020

The native media player for Chromebook OS is not powerful as well as professional to play common media files smoothly. That’s been proved by the complaints from various users about the playback errors of MP4, AVI, MKV, etc media files on Chromebook. Worse still, there are rare third-party video music players for Chrome OS to act as a good alternative when files are not playing on Chromebook.

Luckily, thanks to the arriving of Windows 10 on Chromebooks, media players for Windows 10 are also compatible with Google Chromebooks to play contents, and thus you will have many choices to choose an ideal Chromebook video player to play media files without troubles.

“Unknown File Type” Error Message Occurs, That’s Why We Need Professional Media Player for Chromebook

Chromebooks are great but they lack the ability to play all kinds of media files if there is no matchable Chromebook video player installed. Often the case, when trying to open a file, you will get the “Unknown file type” error message to notify you that the file type isn’t working on your Chromebook. On top of that error message, there are more to blame that make Chromebook a platform inappropriate for some media playback.

1. Chromebook Chrome OS lacks the support for many media formats and codecs. As of now, the built-in Chromebook media player only plays:
Format: 3GP, AVI, MOV, MP4, M4V, M4A, MP3, MKV, OGV, OGM, OGG, OGA, Webm, WAV
Codec: Theora, VP8, VP9, H.264, MPEG4, Divx, Xvid, Opus, Vorbis, MP3, AAC, AMR-NB
2. Interlaced video is not supported on some Chromebook models.
3. Native media player for Chromebook has no full competence to recognize subtitle streams.

The limits to play media files of native Chromebook player may due to the ignoring of software improvement as Chrome OS is not a very popular operating system compared to Windows and macOS. Despite the fact, the requirements to a professional Chromebook video player from the minority should also get enough attention. With the arrival of Windows 10, here come more choices of applications like media players for Windows 10 to Chromebook users. Thus, gaining an excellent video music player for Chromebook to play media files is realizable.

Best Chromebook Video Player Free Download

According to the news, the new feature Dual Boot that Google is developing will allow Chromebook users with Intel processor and a minimum of 64 GB of SSD and 4GB of RAM to switch from Chrome OS to Windows 10. Once Windows 10 is available on your Chromebook, the Windows 10-based applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc can also be used on Chromebooks, let alone the video music players for Windows 10.

Here, we recommend highly-praised media player 5KPlayer to be your default Chromebook video player. 5KPlayer is a free video music player for Windows and Mac with online media download , AirPlay mirroring and DLNA streaming features, which surely will help amplify the joy of your media experience on HP/Acer/AUSU etc Chromebook to the most.

To help you make the decision to choose it as your Chromebook player, here we’d like to explain its media playback feature. Precisely put, 5KPlayer is a 4K UHD media player that eats 3840x2160 4K UHD HEVC/H.264 videos movies without choke and handles common 1080p 720p MP4 MKV FLV AVI WMV MOV DivX Xvid etc media files up to 10bit and 300mbps with no separate downloads. Subtitles and interlaced videos are supported, and aspect ratio adjustments, volume control, video rotation, etc are also allowed.

When playing audio soundtracks, it renders DTS/Dolby sound effects so that there is no need for you to buy extra acoustic equipments at home to enhance the sounds. If you want to display what’s on your Chromebook to big screen of Samsung/LG/Sony etc smart TV, you can use the DLNA feature of this Chromebook video player to wirelessly stream contents among devices at will.

Recently, 5KPlayer has added M3U8 playback feature to allow for direct .m3u8 playlist link streaming without the need of download to save disk space. But if you need, you can also download videos music from Dailymotion, SoundCloud, etc with 5KPlayer at no cost.

Just free download 5KPlayer to be your No.1 media player for Chromebook when Windows 10 launches on Chromebook.

Alternative Chromebook Video Player to 5KPlayer

Since Google hasn’t officially announced when will Windows 10 run on Chromebook, and if you need a Chrome OS video player at present, VLC must be your first choice. VLC media player for Chromebook plays most local video and audio files, network streams, DVD ISOs, etc. like it performs on Windows, macOS, Android and iOS platforms. It supports almost all media formats and various media playback settings as it does as usual. It must be the best media player for Chrome OS as of now when Windows 10 is on the way to Chromebooks.

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